Free The Dirty Parts of the Bible by Sam Torode Page A

was an empty, shriveled hole. But Chester only laughed harder. “Cut it out with them jokes, dammit. I done warned you—you’re gonna make me split my gut.”
    When we reached the stove, Craw leaned over the kettle and grinned. “This, my boy, is mulligan stew. Also known as sonuvabitch stew, when we’re in impolite society.”
    The bubbling mixture was gray as ditchwater, swimming with unidentified chunks of white and brown. It wasn’t Campbell’s, but by this point I didn’t care. “I’m so hungry I could eat a skunk,” I said.
    “Careful,” Craw said. “You might just get your wish. Chester—what’s in this gruel?”
    “Oh, the usual,” Chester said. “Potatoes, onions, beans, carrots, catfish, possum. And a snapping turtle—couldn’t pry the shell off the devil, so I threw him in whole.”
    Craw took another sniff. “Dare I ask how long that possum has been deceased?”
    “Red killed him fresh just this morning,” Chester said, ladling the soup into tin cups. That was one detail I could have done without.
    I took a sip. It tasted pretty good, actually, as long as I closed my eyes and pinched my nose.
    “Fill up,” Craw told me. “This might be our last grub for a while. Food on the road is as scarce as preachers in heaven—if you’ll pardon the expression.”
     
    + + +
     
    A few more hoboes straggled into the Muskogee jungle before nightfall, but none made an impression on me like Chester and Red. Chester looked like an overgrown baby, jolly and plump, with a head as bald as a billiards ball. Red was long and gaunt with sunken cheeks, an Adam’s apple the size of a baseball, and a wild shock of orange hair. Chester did all the talking for the both of them, aside from Red’s grunts. They were the Laurel and Hardy of hoboes.
    When the ladle scraped the bottom of the kettle and our bellies were full, we gathered twigs and branches for a bonfire. Our ragtag company gathered around, about eight in all, and Craw regaled us with his songs. One of his ballads described a hobo’s vision of heaven:
     
    Where the cigarettes grow near whiskey streams,
    An’ hamburgers sprout on trees;
    Where the chickens lay eggs right in your hand,
    An’ lay down to roast in a fryin pan;
    Where the cows churn butter in their pails,
    An’ pour you milk when you pull their tails;
    Where pretty girls swim in the fountains,
    In the Big Potato Mountains . . .
     
    Another of his songs told the story of a hobo Don Juan whose exploits could have filled a dozen dirty comics. The ending went something like this:
     
    Now Hobo Bill sits on his porch,
    An’ his wives play with his hair;
    He sees the freight trains passin’ by,
    But he says ‘Go on, I don’t care.’
     
    He’s settled down, the old-time rambler,
    An’ he’s got more wives than a priest;
    He’s loaded up higher than a riverboat gambler,
    The dirty old bum of a beast.
     
    As Craw sang, the other ’bos would interject an occasional shout or “amen.” It wasn’t much different from a Baptist camp meeting—except that instead of God and the Bible, he was singing about whiskey and women.
    Red sat on a log next to me, but he kept silent. Amidst the revelry, he just sipped his coffee and stared at the dirt between his feet. I couldn’t help but glance at his hands and imagine them tearing the skin off a live possum. But then he jerked up his head and caught me looking, with the one eyeball he had left. And once he latched that yellow, bloodshot orb on me, he wouldn’t let go.
    For the first time, he spoke. “I reckon Craw warned you about the ghost cow.” The mention of a ghost wasn’t as unnerving as Red’s voice itself, which seemed to rise out of his chest and scrape against the sides of his throat on the way out.
    “No,” I said.
    Red pointed a bony finger towards a tree at the edge of camp. “See that there skull?” There was a cracked, sun-bleached cow skull hanging on the trunk of the tree. I nodded.
    “They used to drive cattle over